City ends longterm parking near CSUSM

SAN MARCOS  At the end of August, there will be no more long-term street parking in the industrial park north of Cal State San Marcos.

Parking will be limited to two hours — days, nights and weekends.

The City Council voted 5-0 Tuesday night to limit parking times — a move that comes just a few weeks before the fall semester starts, and an extra 300 students will be moving into the Quad, a newly expanded university housing complex in the affected area.

The first day of fall classes is Aug. 25. The “two-hour parking” signs should start going up around that time.

With on-campus parking permits at $338 a semester, a number of commuting students zip into the empty spots in the business area north of the school. There’s also been a marked increase in parking by the businesses on nights and weekends, likely related to the residents of the Quad, city officials said.

The two-hour limit will be enforced 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Also, no parking will be allowed on any of the streets during certain hours Monday mornings to accommodate street sweeping.

Karl Schwarm, the city’s director of housing and neighborhood services, told council members that spillover student parking has also prevented some street sweeping in the area. Street sweepers bypass more than 2,000 cars each year in industrial park, leaving upward of 1,500 pounds of debris behind that ends up in storm drains and then the ocean.

The area targeted for the new restrictions stretches from the university to state Route 78, and from South Twin Oaks Valley Road to Hill Drive on the east.

The city is hoping to add extra patrols to look for violations, which will result in a $48 ticket.

“The key is going to be a very vigorous presence when school comes back in, so it’s very clear, very early in the school year, that the game has changed in that neighborhood,” City Manager Jack Griffin told the City Council during its meeting Tuesday evening.

The council plans to revisit the impact of the parking limitations in about six months.

But with the price of a ticket at just a fraction of the cost of a parking permit, the city may look at increasing violations for repeat offenders. As it stands, a driver could get seven parking tickets before reaching the amount it would cost to buy a parking pass for the semester.

Last semester, about 11,600 students were enrolled at the university. A school official said 73 percent of the students receive financial aid, including grants, loans and scholarships.

Katlin Sweeney, editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper, the Cougar Chronicle, said some students have found the industrial park “has been the more attractive option, if you can‘t afford to pay (for) the parking permits.”

Sweeney does not own a car but said lack of parking has been “frustrating” for her fellow Quad residents, who face a 10-minute hike home from the parking garage, for which they must buy a permit.

Some 1,500 students live in campus housing, which is along Barham Drive on the north end of the school. There are two sites: the Quad, which this fall will serve a total of nearly 900 students, and the University Village Apartments.

The new two-hour limit is shorter than the average time — 2.2 hours — that customers are at the businesses in the affected area, according to a city staff report. But Schwarm said most of the businesses have a enough off-street parking for their customers and employees. And, he said, two-hour parking is a standard time limit.

No one raised opposition to the parking restrictions at the City Council meeting, and two advisory bodies to the council gave the idea unanimous backing.